Wednesday, 21 January 2015

COUNTER ATTACKER

A while ago now a friend of mine came back from a
holiday on the south coast in a highly agitated state. ‘I went in the
newsagents, first day, and guess who was stood behind the counter?’ he asked.

In this situation it’s hard to know what to say. Do
you go for something vaguely sensible (‘Was it Neville Wanless who used to do
the continuity announcements on Tyne Tees?’) or something completely stupid (‘I
bet it was the stuffed and mounted body of Pickles the dog that found the World
Cup’). In the end I decided to opt for the truth, ‘John O’Rourke,’ I said.

‘How the bloody hell did you guess that?’ My friend
asked. Apparently he was under the impression he was the first Boro fan ever to
have a holiday in Bournemouth.

‘Well, any road I give him a good laugh,’ my friend
said.

‘I hope,’ I said, ‘That you didn’t ask if he sold Sellotape
and, when he told you he did, chanted ‘Give us a roll, give us a roll, John
O’Rourke, John O’Rourke.’

Whatever he’d got up to I could understand why my
friend was excited. I’d have been excited too. There’s always something
thrilling about seeing a footballer in a non-football context. When I was eight
my mother and I were coming home from a shopping trip to Middlesbrough, stopped
at some traffic lights in Marton and when I looked across at the Cortina that
drew up next to us, sitting behind the wheel was Boro's Northern Irish
midfielder Johnny Crossan. Imagine. By the time I got home I was so excited I
was fit to burst. I ran straight round to my best friend Martin Dean's house
and when he answered the door, jabbered: "Deano, Deano! I just saw Johnny
Crossan. And he was in a car." It remains a high point in my life.

And John O’Rourke was a far bigger hero than Johnny
Crossan. He was the first Boro player I saw score a hat-trick. That was at the
first game I ever attended, at home to Carlisle United.

I went with my Uncle Les. We were supposed to meet
my Grandad in the Bob End but by the time we arrived the Bob End was full.

‘Why is it called the Bob End’ I asked my Uncle Les.

My Uncle Les was a student and of a satirical bent,
‘Because you can only go in there if you are called Robert,’ he said.

‘But Grandad’s called Harry,’I said, ‘How does he get in?’

‘He lies to the gateman,’ Uncle Les said.

All the seats in the ground were taken – or all the
ones my uncle could afford, anyway, so we ended up in the Holgate End, in the
corner where it met the Chicken Run.

I was six. The longest I’d ever stood in one place
was at Park Lane Infants carol concert. It was too busy for me to sit on a
barrier, and I was too heavy to sit on my uncle’s shoulders for long. Luckily
on one of the occasions I clambered up there I saw O’Rourke score with a shot
from inside the penalty area. The rest of the half I spent staring at the coats
of the men in front of me and whining. I had a Wagonwheel at half-time, and
after an hour we went home.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.